


Tenants Outraged Over New York Landlord's Plan To Install Facial Recognition Technology (gothamist.com) 281
It is not clear how many New York City apartments are using facial scanning software or how such technology is being regulated. But in a sign of the times, the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development last June began marketing 107 affordable units at a new apartment complex in the South Bronx. Among the amenities listed was "State of the Art Facial Recognition Building Access...." Across the real estate industry, New York City landlords have increasingly been moving to keyless entry systems, citing convenience as well as a desire to offer enhanced security. Over the years, in response to appeals filed by tenants, HCR has ruled in favor of key fob and card entry systems, saying that such substitutions did not violate rent-stabilization and rent-control laws. But the latest technology has triggered even more concerns about the ethics of data collection....
Last month, the management company reached out to a group of tenants to assuage their concerns about StoneLock. But tenants said the presentation, if anything, only deepened their fears that they were being asked to submit to a technology that had very little research behind it.
"This was not something we asked for at any given time," one tenant complaint, while one of the attorneys representing the tenants said that, among other things, their landlord had "made no assurances to protect the data from being accessed by NYPD, ICE, or any other city, state, or federal agency."
"Citing concerns over the potential for privacy and civil liberties violations, tenants at Brownsville's Atlantic Plaza Towers filed an objection to the plan in January..."

French Gas Stations Robbed After Forgetting To Change Gas Pump PINs (zdnet.com) 102
Crooks would operate in small teams of two to three individuals who visited gas stations at night using two vehicles. A man in a first car would use the remote to unlock the gas station, and then a second car, usually a van, would come along seconds later to fill a giant tanker installed in the back of the vehicle with as much as 2,000 or 3,000 liters in one go. The group advertised the fuel they stole on social media, providing a time and place where customers could come and refuel their vehicles or pick up orders for gasoline and diesel at smaller prices. Police uncovered the scheme in April 2018, when they arrested a suspect in possession of a remote used in the hack. "Five men, part of the same gang, were arrested on Monday, according to Le Parisien, who first reported the scheme last November," the report adds.

Which Programming Language Has The Most Security Vulnerabilities? (techrepublic.com) 330
An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: To answer this question, the report compiled information from WhiteSource's database, which aggregates information on open source vulnerabilities from sources including the National Vulnerability Database, security advisories, GitHub issue trackers, and popular open source projects issue trackers. Researchers focused in on open source security vulnerabilities in the seven most widely-used languages of the past 10 years to learn which are most secure, and which vulnerability types are most common in each...
The most common vulnerabilities across most of these languages are Cross-SiteScripting (XSS); Input Validation; Permissions, Privileges, and Access Control; and Information Leak / Disclosure, according to the report.
Across the seven most widely-used programming languages, here's how the vulnerabilities were distributed:
- C (47%)
- PHP (17%)
- Java (11%)
- JavaScript (10%)
- Python (5%)
- C++ (5%)
- Ruby (4%)
But the results are full of disclaimers -- for example, that C tops the list because it's the oldest language with "the highest volume of written code" and "is also one of the languages behind major infrastructure like Open SSL and the Linux kernel."
The report also notes a "substantial rise" across all languages for known open source security vulnerabilities over the last two years, attributing this to more awareness about vulnerable components -- thanks to more research, automated security tools, and "the growing investment in bug bounty programs" -- as well as the increasing popularity of open source software. And it also reports a drop in the percentage of critical vulnerabilities for most languages -- except JavaScript and PHP.
The report then concludes that "the Winner Of Most Secure Programming Language is...no one and everyone...! It is not about the language itself that makes it any more or less secure, but how you use it. If you are mitigating your vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle with the proper management approach, then you are far more likely to stay secure."
Coincidentally, WhiteSource sells software which monitors open source components throughout the software development lifecycle to provide alerts about security (and licensing) issues.

LLVM 8.0 Released With Cascade Lake Support, Better Diagnostics, More OpenMP/OpenCL (phoronix.com) 36

Hacked Tornado Sirens Taken Offline In Two Texas Cities Ahead of Major Storm (zdnet.com) 195
Bad weather, including storms and potential tornadoes, was announced for all last week in the North Texas area. A severe thunderstorm hit the two cities the following night, on March 13. Thunderstorms are known to produce brief tornadoes, but luck had it that no tornado formed and hit the towns that day. Tornadoes are frequent in Texas, as the state is located in Tornado Alley, and tornado season, a period of the year between March and May when most tornadoes happen, had officially begun. Nevertheless, a tornado didn't form on March 13, and, luckily, the sirens weren't needed.

Musician Creates a Million-Hour Song Based On the Number Pi (vice.com) 65
"When users hit 'play' on the virtual tape deck, the algorithm actually 'performs' the piece," the report says. "This way, the 114-year song can fit in just one gigabyte of space, which is mostly comprised of the digits of Pi. The virtual tape deck was also a solution to a built-in quirk of browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox -- users must click on a webpage to trigger a sound." From start to finish, the song lasts 999,999 hours, "a limitation imposed by only considering the first one billion digits of Pi."

Scientists Have Discovered a Shape That Blocks All Sound (fastcompany.com) 179
The researchers also believe that HVAC systems could be fitted with these silencers, and drones could have their turbines muted with such rings. Even in MRI machines, which can be harrowingly loud for patients trapped in a small space, could be quieted. There's really no limit to the possibilities, but it does sound like these silencers will need to be tailored to circumstance. "The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can blocks the sounds of anything," says Boston University professor Xin Zhang, in a press release. You can see a demo of the noise cancellation device here.

US Army Assures Public That Robot Tanks Adhere To AI Murder Policy (gizmodo.com) 118
Directive 3000.09 requires that humans be able to "exercise appropriate levels of human judgement over the use of force," which is sometimes called being "in the loop," as mentioned by above.

Linux 5.1 Continues The Years-Long Effort Preparing For Year 2038 (phoronix.com) 118

Linux 5.0 Released (phoronix.com) 107

Does Listening to Music Have a Negative Impact on Creativity? (slashgear.com) 79
Unlike music, the noise in a library provided a "steady state" environment, which had less of a disruptive effect on participants. Though studying with background music may not completely obliterate someone's ability to think creatively, the research indicates that you may do your best work without it.
But what do Slashdot's readers think? Do you listen to music when you're working -- or do you prefer the steady sounds of silence? Share your own experiences in the comments.
Does listening to music have a negative impact on creativity?

Tristan O'Tierney, Square Co-Founder, Dies at Age 35 (sfchronicle.com) 160
His family is awaiting an official cause of death from officials. "I do know that it was in relation to his addiction," [his mother] Pamela Tierney said. "I know he got to the hospital, he couldn't breathe and they couldn't revive him." O'Tierney was in a three-month rehabilitation program in Ocala and had been battling addiction for three years, Tierney said. O'Tierney openly discussed his struggles with addiction on social media. "As some of you may know, I've been battling with addiction for these past few years," he wrote in September in a now-deleted Instagram post that he also shared on Twitter. "With some success. A lot of failure too though."
Bloomberg remembers him as a former engineer at Yahoo and Apple who was hired to develop Square's original mobile payment app in 2009, then stayed on until 2013.
"In addition to his parents, O'Tierney is survived by his three-old-year daughter, according to an obituary on the website for the funeral home."

Intel Starts Publishing Open-Source Linux Driver Code For Discrete GPUs (phoronix.com) 43

US Labor Organization AFL-CIO Urges Game Developers To Unionize In Open Letter (gamasutra.com) 158
"My question is this: what have you gotten in return? They get rich. They get notoriety. They get to be crowned visionaries and regarded as pioneers. What do you get? Outrageous hours and inadequate paychecks. Stressful, toxic work conditions that push you to your physical and mental limits. The fear that asking for better means risking your dream job. [...] Change will happen when you gain leverage by joining together in a strong union. And, it will happen when you use your collective voice to bargain for a fair share of the wealth you create every day. No matter where you work, bosses will only offer fair treatment when you stand together and demand it."

KDE Plasma 5.15 Released (kde.org) 44

Amazon To NYC After Reconsidering HQ2 Plans: It'd Be a Shame If Something Happened To Your Kids' CS Education 201

H-1B Visa Lottery Will Now Favor Masters, Doctorate Degree Holders (sfchronicle.com) 269

Engineers Create a Robot That Can 'Imagine' Itself (eurekalert.org) 90
For the study, Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski used a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters. The self-model performed a pick-and-place task in a closed loop system that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model. With the closed loop control, the robot was able to grasp objects at specific locations on the ground and deposit them into a receptacle with 100 percent success.

Bill Gates Promises Congress $1 Billion To Build Nuclear Reactors For Fighting Climate Change (sfgate.com) 353
Gates's latest push comes at an important turn in climate politics. Nuclear power has united both unpopular industry executives and a growing number of people -- including some prominent Democrats -- alarmed about climate change. But many nuclear experts say that Gates's company is pursuing a flawed technology and that any new nuclear design is likely to come at a prohibitive economic cost and take decades to perfect, market and construct in any significant numbers... Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said TerraPower is one of many companies that is raising the public's hopes for advanced nuclear reactor designs even though they're still on the drawing boards and will remain unable to combat climate change for many years.
Jonah Goldman, of Gates Ventures, stressed to The Post that Gates was not advocating for TerraPower alone, according to GeekWire.
"Gates thinks the U.S. has 'the best minds, the best lab systems and entrepreneurs willing to take risk,' Goldman told the newspaper. 'But what we don't have is a commitment on Congress' part.'"